Sex. Got your attention? OK, good. I'll try again. Games. Still here? Excellent. Now that I've got your number, let's try the two of them together: sex and games. Hello? Nothing? Where did you go? How strange. You'd think that sex-plus-games would equal a rush of eager gamers waving fists of cash, but according to Brenda Brathwaite, founder of the International Game Developers Association's Sex in Games special interest group, the adult entertainment industry has never really had a look-in. They may have propelled other digital innovations, but when it comes to console-based hanky-panky, grown-up situations have been a turn-off.
It's not for want of trying. Brathwaite says that when she landed a job as producer on Playboy: The Mansion, in 2005, she found there were countless games developers building titles around love, intimacy and, well, hanky-panky, but they were lost in an ocean of family values propriety, wandering souls buried under regulations and smothered by distributor blacklists, treated as "specialists" whose products only saw the light in extremely independent competitions. And so, with only the odd interruption of a virtual carnal nature, game controversies are dominated by violence. Depravity just isn't on the regulator's radar.
And can you imagine what would happen if it were? Just look at the furore over the scenes uncovered in the code of GTA: San Andreas. For heaven's sake, they were two consenting (digital) adults in an 18-rated game: why did it end up such an issue that the then senator Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to get it banned? Such top-down puritanism forces creative conformity in games for fear that explicitly including sex scenes would lead to a loss of filthy lucre - when on earth has that been the case?
This paradox only occurs in the games industry, and it has stifled the development of titles that inspire a different kind of emotional impact than the one that comes from executing a clean headshot. Sex in games can be innocent, it can challenge designers to innovate: witness the tremendous show from the developers at this year's Game Developers Conference, tasked with creating a product tackling "My First Time". There was humour, there was pathos. There was very little intercourse. And they were compelling, involved, emotional.
The games industry is awash in sexuality: booth babes adorn trade shows, networking happens in strip clubs, curvaceous ladies with tight tops are heroines. But sex has been a no-go activity. Until developers deal with this most basic of human urges, sex will remain the preserve of the teenage boy, sniggering behind his hand with a porn mag stuffed in his back pocket.
